Welcome to Rami’s Readings #113 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, papers, videos, and X threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering AI, technology, business, culture, fashion, travel, and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.
👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers
Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to a recommendation from The AI Ethics Brief. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.
📈 Top Recent Editions According to Substack
🤖 AI Reads
The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
Notes: Incredible paper from Apple! One of the authors is Samy Bengio (brother of Yoshua Bengio) 🍁 TLDR: Models aren’t really developing generalizable reasoning and training data is contaminated.
Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.
Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models
Notes: The smallest embedding model is just 0.6B.
Manus Has Kick-Started an AI Agent Boom in China
Notes: From the MIT Technology Review. The manus hype went down in the West Coast, but I am curious to hear from friends abroad.
Shisa V2 405B: Japan’s Highest Performing LLM
Notes: A new competitor to Sakana? Anyone know anything about them?
💼 Business Reads
The Tax Code Change That's Fueling Mass Tech Layoffs
Notes: I heard about this tax code change in 2018 and promptly forgot about it, because I wrongly assumed it wouldn’t persist. Effectively, US technology companies are forced to amortize software research & development costs over 5 years instead of immediately in the tax year it is incurred. It makes software (only!) R&D more expensive than any other R&D.
Quant Firm’s $1 Billion Code Is Focus of Rare Criminal Case
Notes: Interesting legal case to keep an eye on if you’re in high-end software development or machine learning.
🔀 Other Reads
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation
Notes: Anyone want to collaborate on a similar article about machine learning?
TTArtisan On-Camera Flash & Wireless Trigger
Notes: Yes to more vintage and retro camera gear!
The Case for Monogramming Everything
Notes: I used to be completely against monogramming, but now I monogram items I’d never consider reselling—like custom shirts (the only person I know with similar measurements is my brother), my backpack (which lasts a decade and is easily confused with others), and checked luggage (much easier to spot in a sea of bags and helpful for airline recovery if lost).
The Lost Art of Chinese Purple
Notes: Reminds me of the quest to recreate Tyrian purple.
Signing off from Redmond, WA.